Thursday, June 5, 2014

I won’t lie to you. When I first started thinking about teaching genetics courses for the Association of Professional Dog Trainers, I was mostly excited about the second class, which covers behavioral genetics of dogs. The first class was just something we had to do in order to get everyone up to speed on the basics of genetics, to have the information they needed to understand the second course.

But, of course, basic genetics is relevant to every day life with dogs and is interesting on its own. I don’t blog about genetics much, because I’m shoulders deep in highly technical stuff in my PhD program which is hard to communicate to people who aren’t equally immersed in the field. But when I stop to think, it’s not hard to come up with questions about dogs that you can’t answer without basic genetics.

In the past decade, new advances in technology have enabled the discoveries of more and more genes in both humans and dogs. These discoveries get reported in the popular press, such as the gene for small size in dogs (discovered in 2007). What exactly is a gene? What does it do? What does it mean to have different “versions” of a gene? It’s hard to understand these news tidbits if you don’t really get some of these basic concepts.

When you breed a lab and a poodle, you get a labradoodle with very predictable appearance. But if you breed two labradoodles, you can't predict what the puppies will look like. Some will look more like labs, others more like poodles. They're all the same genes, so why is one generation so different from another?

Why is blue merle color associated with deafness in dogs, so that if you breed two blue merles to each other, you're almost certainly going to have some deaf puppies?

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of a field and forget that that’s not all there is. I’m trying to remember to get my nose out of the books (or PDFs of articles) once in a while and look around me.

(Genetics is beautiful and fascinating and I’m extremely lucky to have the chance to talk about it, through the lens of a shared love of dogs, in my upcoming classes with the APDT.)

About the Dog Zombie

Jessica Perry Hekman, DVM, PhD is fascinated by dog brains. She is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she studies the genetics of dog behavior. Her interests include the stress response in mammals, canine behavior, canine domestication, shelter medicine, animal welfare, and open access publishing. You may learn more about Jessica at www.dogzombie.com, or email her at jph at dogzombie dot com. All opinions expressed here are her own.

For the animal shall not be measured by man… They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. (Henry Beston)